Dealing with abuse

[tomreyn]

During the past years, and again recently, we've seen occasional abusive behaviour on both the lobby chat (people insulting others) and on game servers (people grabbing multiple gameservers - possibly to prevent others from playing, game preparation screen chat abuse and kicking others off their games).
This brings up the questions of whether and how we want to handle this, and who will do it. So this can be a mix of policy (declaring a ban policy), organisational (identifying whom we trust to handle things according to this policy, and granting access to them), and technical (developing and installing tools to manage bans on IRC and gameservers) measures.
First of all, we should discuss what the extent of the issue is, which of these we need to counter, which counter measures should and can realistically be taken. Thne we will need to see who is going to implement and manage them.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.

[andy_5995]

One might also consider that not having registered player names might be a problem for the goal of attracting new players. If a gamer see they can't register their nick and realize anyone can play with their nick, they may decide it's not worth it. Kind of like.. for example, would I want to be a regular user on an IRC network, or a message forum, where I know anyone could log in with my nick anytime they wanted?

Though even a registered user (if registration were required or implemented in the future) could change his nick if he was banned, and be able to re-register with a different IP, and so I acknowledge banning by nicks is not a guarantee; however, if a user loses his stats because his nick was banned, it would discourage him from either re-registering, or discourage him from repeating abusive behavior. Also, some people's IPs don't change very frequently, so banning a registered user may be very effective in many cases.

I don't think there's any immediate rush to implement anything to address any current abusive behavior. I haven't heard from other players that it's a big problem right now, and I've only experienced it... maybe 2x in the last 3 months.

To ensure fairness for players, definitely a set policy needs to be written so players have a clear idea of what's allowed and what isn't. And moderators need to be able to warn players by directing them to read the policy.

As for specific policy content, perhaps a simple derivative of something other game maintainers (or forum community maintainers) already have would be all that's needed.

[jammyjamjamman]

During the past years, and again recently, we've seen occasional abusive behaviour on both the lobby chat (people insulting others) and on game servers (people grabbing multiple gameservers - possibly to prevent others from playing, game preparation screen chat abuse and kicking others off their games).
This brings up the questions of whether and how we want to handle this, and who will do it. So this can be a mix of policy (declaring a ban policy), organisational (identifying whom we trust to handle things according to this policy, and granting access to them), and technical (developing and installing tools to manage bans on IRC and gameservers) measures.
First of all, we should discuss what the extent of the issue is, which of these we need to counter, which counter measures should and can realistically be taken. Thne we will need to see who is going to implement and manage them.
Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.

Tbh, I haven't really noticed/ been properly observing the extent of poor behaviour on MegaGlest. However, I think we can easily get some basic measurements for the extent of abusive behaviour. If someone has a fairly intact irc log, we could e.g. count bad words/ sentences with a bit of python.

Edit: since Megaglest is an organisation, my suggestion might not be allowed under EU laws 

[Pizza90]

Maybe have a list of words to be replaced with  ****? (Ideally the sender would see it as it was written but the others would see it censored so nobody tries to evade it).

[Omega]

Censoring systems work really poorly. They tend to easily either miss things or censor too much. It's futile to block everything that could be offensive (since many aren't profane) and can even teach people ways to be offensive, haha. I remember how much bad shit I learned from RuneScape as a kid. It would censor words like "poof" and that made me look up a word I was using innocently and learn the bad definitions. So, like, way to go, Jagex. Not to mention people very quickly figured out how to get around the censor.

I like to think profanity has its place, anyway. Toxicity is a community thing (I think again to RuneScape, which had some Pride event a few years back and the community handled it very, very badly) and a moderation issue (I've long since concluded that toxicity needs to be stamped out hard by moderators -- there's that whole "paradox of intolerance" thing). If it isn't handled quickly, the good people leave and there will only be toxic people left and then it becomes a self perpetuating cycle (see also: why I refuse to play LoL ).

[Coldfusionstorm]

Toxcity should be taken seriously.

imho. Best option for megaglest is to be able to block peoples messages.

[Pizza90]

I think reddit shadowbans (aka they ban you, you can continue posting but nobody says your messages). That's what I think would be useful and which I tried to explain in my previous message. You send in the chat a 'bad' word and you can see it but others don't. Of course what's 'bad' is debatable...but given MG is family friendly you probably want to leave the f and n words out of the chat